Psychopathic Robots Predicted

Rodrick Wallace of the New York Psychiatric
Institute has released a
draft version of a
new paper (PDF format) in which he speculates on the
mathematical foundations of machine intelligence and the difficulty of
controlling the development of a complex, conscious machine. Even
if such a machine could
be created in an initially stable state, Wallace believes it likely
that the machine would become psychotic. "The most
likely use of the first generations of conscious machines will be to
model the various forms of psychopathology, since we have little or no
understanding of how consciousness is stabilized in humans or other
animals." Last year we mentioned another paper by Wallace
in which he predicted that biomimetic machines were likely to "fail
insidiously, irregularly, and progressively" for similar
mathematical reasons.